Mike Vichich grew up in Michigan. His family, he recalls, dedicated their lives to public service. His parents were teachers, his uncle in the FBI, and both grandfathers served in the military. “Growing up, public service was always a really admirable way to spend your life and career,” he told TechCrunch. “I have three young children. I want them to grow up in a country where the government can actually do things.”
He went on to work in consulting and then founded a consumer company that he sold to Olo for $200 million in 2021. After his wife gave birth to their third son, he and Brandon Max, a founding engineer at his last startup, began discussing what they wanted to do in this next chapter of their careers.
Every idea came back to one thing: that selling to the government was really hard. “We were, maybe there’s something to it.” In 2023, they launched Pursuit, a website that helps companies find and win government contracts. On Wednesday, it announced a $22 million Series A round led by Mike Rosengarten, general partner at Builders VC and co-founder of OpenGov. The company has raised $25.5 million in funding to date from investors including Jack Altman (then at Alt Capital), Bill Gurley and Sam Hinkie at 87 Capital.
Pursuit works by continuously reading public data from about 110,000 state, local education agencies (SLEDs), Vichich explained, meaning its AI systems crawl budgets, contract registries, FOIA records and requests for proposals from every state, school district, county, city and special district across the country. “We’re turning fragmented public data into fully researched opportunities,” he said.
It then shows the SLED companies that are most likely to buy a Pursuit customer’s specific services within the next year, based on indicators like their budget, the problems they’re facing and who’s in charge.
He said the customer is any company that sells to public services and described Pursuit as “an AI clone of themselves, making sure they know everything that’s going on in every account in their patch.”
Others in this space include Starbridge, GovSpend and Deltek GovWin IQ.
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Vichich said he hopes Pursuit can help make SLED contracting opportunities more transparent and accessible. “The data has always been public, that’s the irony,” he said. It’s just that this data is buried in thousands of websites, lost in PDFs and meeting videos.
“The cost of finding and analyzing has historically been very high relative to the value of any contract token,” he continued. “The chase is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.”
This piece has been updated to clarify the job Vichich’s uncle had and this round was.
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